Originally prior to compiling the resource ‘Set
Percentages By Venue, Season, Surface & Tournament Category’ I had no set hypotheses
about what I might find – my inspiration was the WTA event in Baku which in my
head had a lot of 3 set matches and retirements and I attributed that to the
extreme heat in the Azerbaijan capital.
We shall see if that’s indeed the case when I publish the WTA stats in
the near future!

From the resource tables at the above link, there are a
number of things we can infer looking at the stats…

In the first table, with the data assessed by season, it’s
clear that there’s a little disparity in the number of sets between the first
and second half of the year. In
January-March 64.00% of matches were completed in two sets whilst in April-June
it was marginally higher at 64.38%.
However this dropped to 62.41% and 62.08% in July-September and
October-November respectively. If I did
have a pre-conceived idea about this it probably went against my thoughts as I thought
there’d be less player effort and more straight set ‘tanks’ in the latter parts
of the season, so this data is pretty interesting.

With regards to retirements, it’s hard to infer a
seasonal bias with the lowest season (Jul y to September) having 3.64% of
matches ending in a retirement compared to the highest being 4.16% (October to
December) – although it’s perhaps telling that the end of the season has the
highest retirement percentage as some players may well be looking towards
several weeks on holiday.

In the second table, with data assessed by surface, the
stat that really stands out is the lack of retirements on clay (3.45% of matches)
compared to the three other surfaces which are all over 4%. There can be little doubt that the hard
ground of the other surfaces contributes to more player retirements. Clay also had the highest percentage of matches
ending in three sets, although there wasn’t a huge amount in it. I’ve thought in the past that clay is a bit
of a ‘leveller’ for many matches and perhaps that’s evident here.

What did surprise me a little was the lack of retirements
in 250 events (evidenced in table 3).
Just 3.57% of matches ended in retirement in 250s, compared to 4.60% in
500s and 4.45% in 1000s(Masters) events.
What was also apparent is the
amount of matches ending in 2 sets in 500’s – a very high 64.94% which is
almost 2% higher than 250s and 1000s. I
cannot logically explain why that is the case, but with samples of well over
1000 matches, it appears that is a clear trend.

There’s been lots of discussion on my Twitter timeline
about players retiring this year and what’s interesting is that the figure for
retirements has barely moved from year to year so it’s definitely not more
prevalent this year as previous years – just 0.13% separates the 4 years so
there’s barely any difference year on year there.

However, what can be evidenced is the high percentage of
matches ending in 3 sets this year – 34.42% with the next highest (2011) having
a percentage of 32.55%. Could this be
the start of a trend due to factors such as increased competition? Or is it just variance? Only time will tell there – certainly should
2014 continue in this vein then there’s likely to be a reason for it…

So how can we use this information to profit in the
markets?

For bettors – the information (especially the individual
tournament venue data) is invaluable for over/under games or 2/3 sets lines and
I will be doing some backtesting in the near future to assess just how viable
the data is on that basis. Furthermore,
some tournaments with high percentages of retirements can be treated
differently with manipulation of the various bookmaker rules on
retirements. Certainly there’s scope to
tailor your bets to suit your own agenda in this regard, and I don’t believe
for one minute the adage that retirements are ‘win some, lose some’.

For in-play traders – this information should be
extremely useful to gauge whether there’s a higher or lower likelihood in a
match going 3 sets. Should a tournament
venue have an extremely high percentage of matches going 3 sets, then laying
the winner of the first set who will almost certainly be fairly heavy odds-on should
be pretty viable.

Looking at the data, the following tournament venues have
a very high percentage of matches going 3 sets (over 40%):-

Santiago

Stuttgart

Gstaad

Atlanta

Bogota

New Haven

Montreal

Vienna

The following tournament venues have a very high
percentage of matches being decided in 2 straight sets (over 68%):-

Costa do Sauipe

Monte Carlo

Halle

S-Hertogenbosch

Brisbane

Chennai

Doha

Dubai

San Jose

Kuala Lumpur

The following tournament venues have a very high
percentage of matches ending in retirement (over 7%):-

Estoril (Oeiras)

Eastbourne

Dubai

Rotterdam

Vienna

Interestingly, with Vienna having high percentages for
retirements and matches going 3 sets, it’s unsurprising that it has the lowest
percentage for matches ending in 2 sets – just 51.85%. Laying the first set winner in Vienna
historically would clearly have had a huge return in 2010-2012 and with this
tournament very soon on the schedule a big opportunity could arise soon! All of those three years have had lower than
56% of matches ending in straight sets so there’s clear trend at that venue.

The Lead Loss/Recovery Data Spreadsheets have taken the Tennis Trading World by storm - discussed in detail in October 2015 at the Matchbook Traders Conference these incredible spreadsheets highlight lead loss & deficit recovery in individual sets, as well as how often a player loses/gains the first break of the second set based on whether they won or lost the first set!